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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: altair19 who wrote (83743)	10/20/2006 9:46:18 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 361433

Cardinals - Tigers Position Analysis mlb.mlb.com Cardinals - Tigers Rotation Analysis mlb.mlb.com

To: altair19 who wrote (83743)	10/20/2006 10:30:09 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361433

Cardinals bring plenty of baggage to Detroit ____________________________________________________________ By David Mayo Columnist The Grand Rapids Press Friday, October 20, 2006 DETROIT -- The St. Louis Cardinals celebrated alone because there is no fan rapture after clinching on the road, just the few stragglers who can't take their eyes off the train wreck. How did that pin-drop moment late Thursday in New York contrast with Comerica Park's rumbling explosion six days ago, after Magglio Ordonez's home run sent the Detroit Tigers to the World Series? Starkly, and in a fashion the Tigers do not care to see illustrated again, for they host Game 7 if the World Series maxes out, and could be the ones facing home heartbreak next time. It shouldn't come to that. The Tigers finally have an opponent, the same one as 1968, the same one as 1934. The Cardinals punched their ticket 43 1/2 hours before Saturday's first pitch of the World Series here, and don't let the nature of their 3-1 victory over the New York Mets fool you into thinking they suddenly are an invigorated ballclub. It hardly is possible to get to the World Series any more broken than the Cardinals. The World Series has produced a wild-card survivor, Detroit, against a team which won 83 regular-season games, the second-fewest by any World Series participant in a non-strike, non-lockout season. Only the 1973 Mets, with 82 wins, had fewer. Both stumbled and bumbled their way through the final two months of the regular season unlike any other contending teams, with Detroit backing out of a division championship, and St. Louis almost backing out of the playoffs. Yet they have arrived to play for a world championship as equals, difficult though it may be to consider them as such. The Tigers have righted their problems this postseason. The Cardinals merely masked theirs long enough to survive two playoff series in the inferior National League. The Cardinals' issues were on such full display in Game 7 at Shea Stadium that it would have taken a celebratory champagne blast to the eyeballs not to see them. Scott Rolen, their $90 million third baseman, isn't talking to Tony LaRussa, who has won zero championships in 10 previous seasons as Cardinals manager. Why anyone would resort to such petulance at this point is bizarre, but that has the makings of a Ben Wallace-Flip Saunders meltdown, and an offseason showdown. Second baseman Ronnie Belliard and right fielder Juan Encarnacion almost collided on a pop fly, and left fielder Preston Wilson and center fielder Jim Edmonds did collide on a routine fly, and while both plays were made, they communicated like Rolen and LaRussa at dinner. The Cardinals chased one high fast ball after another from Oliver Perez, and made an average major-league pitcher look much better. Rolen, after being robbed of a two-run home run moments earlier, fielded a routine grounder and sailed his throw to first base into the stands, loading the bases with Mets in the bottom of the sixth. Superior pitching by Jeff Suppan, one of the Cardinals' two reliable starters, saved that situation. A two-run home run by Yadier Molina in the ninth inning broke a 1-1 tie. And the Mets went seven hitless innings before leaving the bases loaded in the ninth against Adam Wainwright, because as subpar as the Cardinals' offense was, New York's was absolutely dreadful. The Cardinals enter their second World Series this decade the same way they did in 2004, after a magnificent Game 7 by Suppan. They were baseball's best team that year but ran into the destiny-laden Boston Red Sox, who rallied from a 3-0 playoff deficit to beat the New York Yankees, then swept the Cardinals in the World Series. The Tigers never faced such a precipitous playoff situation as those Red Sox, but certainly have similar momentum. Las Vegas has installed Detroit as more than a 2-1 favorite. If the World Series finale is a spoiled occasion here, St. Louis will do all the celebrating. It is a vision the Tigers never want to see, but given their opponent's unsettled state, one they shouldn't.

To: altair19 who wrote (83743)	10/20/2006 10:46:36 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361433

re 'I spent some time reading on the George W. Bush thread Id rather the voodoo treatment ground glass in my shoes with dried blow fish liver applied liberally.. to 'dumb me down......'

To: altair19 who wrote (83743)	10/20/2006 10:53:07 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 361433

Vietnam & Iraq: Another 'Bright Shining Lie' _____________________________________________________________ by Elizabeth Sullivan* Published on Thursday, October 19, 2006 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer The ultimate tragedy of Iraq is that it was dreamed up by a generation that lived through an earlier war constructed atop deception and denial. The Vietnam generation should have known better. Yet Iraq is the same "bright shining lie" told by the same sort of smart men -- and this time, smart women -- that Neil Sheehan chronicled in his devastating book about the many-tiered American deceptions that made Vietnam such a quagmire. As with Vietnam, this nation is propping up a corrupt Iraqi government and distorting outcomes by picking its own political winners and losers. As with Vietnam, U.S. officials faced with military stalemate are grasping at straws via vain attempts to "Iraqify" a national military and police force that lacks legitimacy with most Iraqis. Why else would Iraqis be able to take over only two of the nation's 18 provinces when -- according to ground commander Gen. George Casey -- 80 percent to 90 percent of current violence is concentrated in only five? It may not be surprising that a White House where few served in Vietnam would fail to see the Vietnam analogies, and instead cast the post-9/11 landscape as the ideological equivalent of the Cold War. President George W. Bush effectively sat out Vietnam in the champagne branch of the Texas Air National Guard. Vice President Dick Cheney "had other priorities" and five draft deferments. The guy with the combat credentials, Colin Powell, was sidelined over at State. His Vietnam-derived Powell Doctrine famously spoke of going to war only when the national interest required it, and then with forces more than sufficient to win and an exit strategy to match. But it had no influence on a Pentagon full of ideologues intent on using America's lone superpower status as a lever to achieve even more world power. Administration figures continue to mislead each other and the American people about how we're doing in Iraq. Yet at the root of these lies are the political generals and line officers who signed off on plans they knew wouldn't work and continue to keep silent out of a mistaken interpretation of long traditions of military deference to civilian leadership. "I don't do body counts," Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told CBS News in March 2002, when asked about Taliban and al-Qaida losses in Afghanistan. In Vietnam, the military's lies came in part via meaningless body counts that greased assurances that all was well. Somehow, in Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the idea took hold that if officials didn't tally enemy or civilian dead in Iraq, it wouldn't look like Vietnam. All that meant was that the military lost an important index of how bad things might be. The irony is, the longer Iraq goes on, the more it looks like Vietnam. Instead of intruding into an ongoing civil war, we have created that civil war, one that gains vitality every day that U.S. troops remain on the ground as a nationalist irritant. U.S. forces in Iraq need an exit strategy and allies that will make such an exit possible without enflaming regional war, not the same old talking points. Asked at a recent Pentagon news conference to respond to one ex-Vietnam hand's criticism of stay-the-course attitudes in the midst of Iraqi civil war, ground commander Casey -- with Rumsfeld at his side -- pretended he didn't see the problem. "The broad strategy, where we are working to bring the levels of insurgency down as we bring Iraqi security forces up, I believe, is still a valid framework for what we are doing in Iraq," Casey said. That sort of see-no-evil approach to a failing war belongs in Vietnam. The Bush administration and its congressional supporters remain rooted firmly in a place of denial even as public opinion swings against the war in Iraq. And that heralds new dangers. Unless the uniformed military finds its voice and demands a real strategy and more rational exit map, this nation may be doomed to repeat another episode from Vietnam: the helter-skelter withdrawal, leaving foes and friends alike to sort it out through bloodshed. _______________________ *Elizabeth Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages. This is one of a series of columns examining post-9/11 security policies. © Copyright 2006 The Plain Dealer